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nl-201507FSFE Newsletter - July 2015
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlWhile looking into the Digital Single Market (DSM) package,
our president Karsten Gerloff noticed that the EU Commissioner Günther
Oettinger neglected to publish his recent meetings with lobbyists. So Karsten
reminded the Commission about their transparency commitment. Meanwhile
Oettinger's Head of Cabinet, Michael Hager, explained that a long-term sickness
leave in the cabinet has led to a delay in publishing the meetings, and they
updated the lists of meetings.

But it turned out Karsten
was not the only one interested in Oettinger's meetings. A few days after
Karsten's reminder the Spiegel and other media published news stories about it.
According to Spiegel Online’s figures, 90% of the Commissioner’s meetings were
with corporate representatives, business organisations, consultancies and law
firms. Only 3% of his meetings were with NGOs. Of the top ten organisations
he’s meeting with, seven are telecoms companies, most of whom are staunchly
opposed to net neutrality.

Without the EU's transparency commitment, it would have been almost
impossible to research this. This shows how important such transparency
commitments are and it shows how important it is that organisations and
individuals actually monitor such publications. Furthermore we hope that from
now on Oettinger better balances his meetings, so he hears different sides of
an issue, and can make an informed decision.

TiSA: intransparent treaty might prevent digital sovereignty

Nowadays countries start to demand the source code for software they
procure. If they sign the currently negotiated Trade in Services Agreement
(TiSA) they might be forbidden to continue doing so.

End of May, a draft of TiSA (Trade in Services Agreement) was leaked. TiSA
is yet another international agreement, like the Trans-Atlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP), or the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). It is apparently negotiated by 51 countries
including the EU. In the section “Transfer
or Access to Source Code” the leaked version prevents countries to give
priority to Free Software:

No Party may require the transfer of, or access to, source code of
software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition of providing
services related to such software in its territory.

For purposes of this Article, software subject to paragraph 1 is limited
to mass-market software, and does not include software used for critical
infrastructure.

We believe that a trade agreement should not force signatory countries to
give up control over their IT infrastructure for decades to come. On the
contrary,
companies should provide the source code if the public administrations
demands it, as well as the corresponding rights to use the software for any
purpose, to share the software with others, as well as to adapt the software
for their own needs without anyone else's permission.

There are many groups in Europe who do advocacy and lobby work for software
freedom. Some have done this work for many years, some just started doing it.
Unfortunately often they do not know from each other's existence, and therefore
cannot benefit from a knowledge exchange.

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06 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0100news-20150616-01FSFE welcomes adoption of copyright report in EP's JURI committeeIn an important step towards modernising the EU's copyright laws, the Legal Affairs committee of the European Parliament on Tuesday adopted a report on the Copyright Directive by MEP Julia Reda.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlIn an important step towards modernising the EU's copyright laws, the
Legal Affairs committee of the European Parliament on Tuesday adopted
a report on the Copyright Directive by MEP Julia Reda.

By adopting the report with 23 votes in favour and 2 against, the
committee asks the European Commission to consider a number of
important updates to copyright as it works towards a revision of the
EU Copyright Directive.

"In a world built on information, copyright law is important in
shaping the ways in which we live and work," says Karsten Gerloff,
FSFE's president. "We hope that MEPs will further strengthen the
rights of users as the report moves towards a plenary vote."

FSFE,
which provided
input to the MEPs on the Legal Affairs committe ahead of the
vote, views the adopted report as largely positive. The committee
generally supported the idea that copyright exceptions and
limitations should apply equally both on- and offline. The MEPs
also voted in favour of allowing authors to dedicate their works
directly to the public domain.

The JURI commmitte adopted language stating that technological
measures such as Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) should not stop
users from enjoying copyright exceptions and limitations. However, the
adopted report leaves out concrete measures to ensure that people can
actually enjoy the full use of works that they have acquired.

On the negative side, the text adopted today is lacking in some
important respects. It does not contain an explicit statement that
hyperlinks do not require a copyright license, so that this essential
building block of the web remains in danger.

Reda's proposal for an "open norm" akin to the "fair use" concept in
the US was significantly weakened. The adopted wording on text and
data mining is regrettably ambiguous. FSFE also regrets the deletion
of language that made a clear distinction between physical and
"intellectual property".

MEPs can still submit amendments to the report. The European
Parliament is scheduled to hold a plenary vote on July 9.

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16 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0100nl-201506FSFE Newsletter - June 2015
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.html
On the first Wednesday of May, a coalition of digital liberties
organizations, including FSFE, and a multitude of individual activists
held the
International Day Against DRM 2015
to raise awareness about digital restrictions management, a pervasive
and deeply entrenched mechanism designed to plunder the citizenry of
the concept of ownership.

Along with numerous other defenders of consumer rights and digital
liberties we published
a statement asking
legislators to guarantee the traditional right to tinker with our
property. This was necessitated by both the prior steady erosion of the
rights to repair and modify our belongings and the renewed push by
various manufacturing companies, like
John Deere, one of the largest
manufacturers of agricultural equipment, to deny their customers the
right to modify their own property in whatever way the customers wish,
using bad laws like the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which
forbid consumers to circumvent or remove certain defects from their
purchases.

FSFE is looking for a systems architect

Due to sustained growth we have experienced in the last few years, our
infrastructure has developed into a state where it is no longer able to
fulfil our needs. Therefore, we are
looking for a systems architect
to help us document our existing infrastructure dependencies, develop
this into a maintainable architecture, and help our system administrators
migrate our services to the new architecture.

If you have a good grasp of Free Software, creating technical
documentation, virtualization, MTAs, database servers, and web services
and you wish to help us ensure scalability and continued availability
of both Fellowship services and our internal tools, then
you are welcome to apply by contacting our Executive Director,
Jonas Öberg. This is your chance
to gain a deeper understanding of the technical challenges faced by our
volunteers and staff, and help us overcome these hurdles!

This newsletter started with DRM; it will also end with DRM:
unscrupulous actors are attempting to use secretly negotiated trade
agreements TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and
CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) to make it extremely
difficult for future governments to get rid of current bans on
circumventing digital restrictions mechanisms. Instead, they would force
governments to impose ever-harsher penalties on anyone who dares to
tinker with their property.

We at FSFE would rather avoid that future. Hence, we are asking you to
contact your elected representatives both in the European parliament and
various legislative bodies throughout Europe and let them know that you
wish European laws to remain the province of European legislators. Ask
them to oppose
secretly negotiated
treaties; ask them to demand transparency and openness; and, most
importantly, do it now and tell your legislators about the things you
like to do with your possessions.

It would also be nice if you could tell them what you would be unable
to do if those secretive trade agreements were ratified, but you cannot:
we do not know the current state of the negotiations. This is quite
annoying, but despair not: most of our elected representatives are also
in the dark, and they are unlikely to enjoy it. This offers us a unique
opportunity to tune them against the deals before they are finalized
and presented for ratification: let us get our representatives to
oppose these deals while they can make a decision based on democratic
principles and need not yet decide whether the economic perks outweigh
the proposed harm to a free society.

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05 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0100news-20150605-01FSFE submits comments on Reda copyright reportOn June 16th, the European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee will vote on a report with a number of groundbreaking recommendations for copyright reform.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlOn June 16th, the European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee will vote on a report with a number of groundbreaking recommendations for copyright reform.

The report was written by MEP Julia Reda (Pirate Party) and consists of a number of very sensible proposals to adapt copyright law to today's challenges. However, the report has also drawn a considerable amount of opposition from stakeholders who benefit from the current, overly strict rules.

The Legal Affairs committee will decide on the final shape of the report before the vote in plenary session in July. FSFE has provided input to MEPs on a number of points that we consider crucial to copyright reform.

FSFE's input to the members of the Legal Affairs committee focuses on the following points:

The public domain should be actively safeguarded, extended and opened to authors who want to publish directly their work in it.
Works (software included) produced by public sector should be made available to the public for use and modification.
Digital Restriction Management (DRM) should not hinder the actual exercise of exceptions and limitations. Source code of such technologies must be published to enable interoperability and respect of user's privacy.

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05 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0100news-20150527-01FSFE is looking for a systems administrator and
architectPlease note that this position is no longer open for applications. The Free Software Foundation Europe was founded in 2001 and has gone through a tremendous growth since then, both in the number of volunteers and staff, and also in the complexity of our technical infrastructure and the number of services we run and offer for both internal and external use. We're currently looking for a system administrator and architect that, for a limited time, can support us in our work to migrate our services to a new infrastructure.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.html
Please note that this position is no longer open for
applications.
The Free Software Foundation Europe was
founded in 2001 and has gone through a tremendous growth
since then, both in the number of volunteers and staff, and
also in the complexity of our technical infrastructure and
the number of services we run and offer for both internal and
external use. We're currently looking for a system
administrator and architect that, for a limited time, can
support us in our work to migrate our services to a new
infrastructure.

The migration project will move our services to a new
infrastructure and revise the services we currently offer.
The goal of the project is to make the infrastructure more
coherent, with less dependencies, and with a separation of
services that make it easier for volunteers to manage and
help the organisation manage individual services in the long
term.

Who we're looking for

We're looking for a senior system administrator or systems
architect that can work in close coordination with our
existing system administrators, staff and volunteers, to
support our migration project through all of its stages,
starting with the archaeological challenge of creating a high
level overview of our services and their dependencies, and
ending with the migration of our core services. Key skills
will include technical documentation, virtualization
environments, MTAs (Postfix), database servers and web
services.

What we need to do

The person we're looking with will be tasked with the
following. Please note that the first steps are more detailed
than the latter steps, and we'll work together to
continuously revise this plan as we go. All of this will also
involve coordination with others, and a lot of information,
especially for the first parts, can be gotten from existing
documentation or from other system administrators.

Create a high level service documentation, with a focus
on (for each service):
Authentication mechanisms
Code base (custom work, patches, or off the shelf
components)
Interdependencies with other services
Physical / virtual infrastructure location
Usage (estimate usage from logs etc, as well as a
brief synopsis of who the main users are:
external, internal, etc)
Additional documentation that may be needed for
specific services (such as mail), the nature of which will
need to be discussed and determined at a later time, when
the first high level overview is complete.
Analyse the current services and propose a new
architecture, focusing on the services and the dependencies
between them.
Provide a migration plan that detail the steps needed
to be taken in order to successfully migrate our existing
services to the new architecture and infrastructure.
Migrate, and support the migration, of core services to
it, including shutting down and removing old services in an
orderly fashion.
Location and travel

The FSFE system administrators work largely remotely, and
most of the work can be done from anywhere in the world. It's
beneficial for communication that the person helping us is
roughly located in Europe, and one or two trips may be needed
to meet with other system administrators and staff.

More information

If you think that you're the right person, know someone who
is, or just want more information, you're more than welcome to
reach out to FSFE's executive director
Jonas Öberg, preferrably by email to
jonas@fsfe.org.

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27 May 2015 00:00:00 +0100news-20150506-01A restriction on technological restrictionsBut all of us depend on the possibility to install or replace programs that we use every day, to increase our security, privacy or convenience -- or just because we happen to like using a different program on our laptop, tablet, phone, router, television, car, or on other devices.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlSafecast is a global project to map radiation data from around the
world and release this information openly. When the project just started
out, they used modified hardware, together with their own custom software
and a few clever tweaks, to allow anyone to participate in the project.
This kind of ingenuity, the ability to re-purpose or adapt existing
technology by replacing or supplementing its software, should be
permitted and encouraged by the law. In the example of Safecast,
fortunately nobody prevented them from being innovative.

But all of us depend on the possibility to install or replace programs
that we use every day, to increase our security, privacy or convenience
-- or just because we happen to like using a different program on our
laptop, tablet, phone, router, television, car, or on other devices.

Today, on the International Day Against DRM, the undersigned
organisations are calling on lawmakers to safeguard the right to tinker
for everyone. To make sure that the owner of every device is allowed to
replace or supplement the software in that device if they so choose,
thereby empowering owners to control their own property. Many
manufacturers today add technological restrictions that prevent device
owners from changing their devices, or having someone do so for them.
This can be in breach of the licences on the devices (as with Free
Software/Open Source Software licences, which grant the rights to use,
study, share, and improve the software for any purpose). It is clear that
any right to tinker must also be coupled with a legal provision that
prevents technological restrictions of the same right.

To successfully guarantee that device owners are in control of their
own technology, the following organisations ask that the right to tinker
be guaranteed for everyone, and that technological restrictions that
interfere with this right be limited by law.

]]>http://fsfe.org/news/2015/news-20150506-01.html
06 May 2015 00:00:00 +0100nl-201505FSFE Newsletter - May 2015
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlThe European Commission has published a new version of its
strategy for the internal use of Free Software. The FSFE provided input to the
Commission during the update phase and while the strategy is broadly similar to
the previous version, there are some
improvements.

Unlike previous versions, this time the strategy is accompanied by an action
plan aimed at putting it into practice. However, the action plan is not public,
so it is not possible to assess the Commission's progress towards its own
goals. We would welcome it, if the Commission would soon publish its action
plan.

Interpretation of law restricting Free Software in Switzerland

FSFE's goal is that software which is developed with tax money has to be
released as Free Software. By doing so the public administration would
strengthen and stimulate a fair IT market.

In Switzerland, there is currently uncertainty regarding the development and
release of Free Software by public contractors. The trigger for this was the
development and release of the software “OpenJusticia” by the Swiss Federal
Supreme Court. The federal council now wants to examine whether the publication
of Free Software by the federal administration can be allowed explicitly. The FSFE demands a clarification,
so that publicly-financed software can be legally and unambiguously released as
Free Software.

Worldwide 63 events about Open Standards

This year again volunteers around the world, accompanied by international
organisations as well as politicians and public services joined our demand for
document freedom. The global Document Freedom Day had 63 local events in 31
countries on 4 continents. Read our 2015
report to learn about political activities, new cartoons and illustrations,
and have a look at pictures from the events including tasty DFD cakes.

We currently wrap-up the PDFreaders campaign, and we need your help to
measure our success.

Started in 2009 FSFE’s goal with the campaign was to get rid of
advertisement for proprietary PDF readers. We focused on the websites of public
administrations, and many people helped us gather contact details for over 2000
public websites which advertised non-free software. Many people helped us to
contact the public administrations, governments were made aware of it and
published guidelines. Until now we know that 772 of the 2110 bugs were fixed,
which is a 36% success rate.

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04 May 2015 00:00:00 +0100news-20150424-01[Blog] Final PDFreaders advertisement squashingWe currently wrap-up the PDFreaders campaign, and we need your help to measure our success. Started in 2009 FSFE’s goal with the campaign was to get rid of advertisement for proprietary PDF readers. We focused on the websites of public administrations, and many people helped us gather contact details for over 2000 public websites which advertised non-free software. Many people helped us to contact the public administrations, governments were made aware of it and published guidelines. Until now we know that 772 of the 2110 bugs were fixed, which is a 36% success rate. But for most countries we did not check the status for several months now. That’s why we need your help now to make one final round. We are looking for volunteers who can help us checking websites in their native language, following the step-by-step guide in the blog post.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlSupport FSFE, join the FellowshipMake a one time donation]]>http://blogs.fsfe.org/mk/final-pdfreaders-advertisement-squashing/
24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0100news-20150414-01Statement on changed relations between the FSFE and Kern SibbaldEffective the 6th of March 2015, the FLA between Kern Sibbald and FSFE has been terminated at the request of Kern Sibbald. The FSFE is committed to ensuring to the best of its ability that Bacula.org software remains Free Software, and can only regret that Kern Sibbald in this way chose to terminate the FLA.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.html
Since 2006, the FSFE has been the fiduciary for the copyrights held by developers in the Bacula.org software, on the basis of a Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) and Memorandum of Understanding signed between Kern Sibbald and the FSFE on the 15th of November 2006

Being the fiduciary means that the FSFE has had the authority to act on matters of copyright infringement in Bacula.org software, as well as provide guidance on licensing matters to the project.

Effective the 6th of March 2015, the FLA between Kern Sibbald and FSFE has been terminated at the request of Kern Sibbald. The FSFE is committed to ensuring to the best of its ability that Bacula.org software remains Free Software, and can only regret that Kern Sibbald in this way chose to terminate the FLA.

Any contribution made to Bacula.org software after the 6th of March 2015, which was previously covered by this FLA, either directly or by an FLA or copyright assignment signed with Kern Sibbald, is now no longer assigned to the FSFE as the fiduciary.

At this time, FLAs which have been signed directly between a Bacula.org contributor and the FSFE remain unaffected. FLAs or copyright assignments specific to the Bacula Enterprise Version of the software signed directly with Bacula Systems or Kern Sibbald are also not affected, as they are excluded from the agreement between Kern Sibbald and the FSFE.

Due to there being multiple version of copyright assignments and FLAs in effect, and many other parameters to take into account, the exact implications of this termination may vary between individuals.

Should you have questions in relation to this termination or how it affects you, the FSFE has setup a contact point dedicated to answering these questions. You can address your questions to: fla-bacula@fsfeurope.org

The FSFE is working with Kern Sibbald and its own legal counsel to address any questions or concerns that are raised in relation to this.

If you are a developer who has contributed to Bacula, we recommend that you look at what FLAs or copyright assignments you have agreed to, and make sure that you fully understand how this termination affect you. If you are not sure, you are welcome to email us and we will do our best to assist you. Please take a look at our FAQ on this issue first.

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14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0100news-20150408-01Open Standards around the worldDocument Freedom Day is the day when we talk about Open Standards around the world. In 2015, all together, we turned this day once more into a global event with 63 local event organisers in 31 countries on 4 continents. Volunteers around the world, accompanied by international organisations as well as politicians and public services joined our demand for document freedom. Read our report to see what happened during Document Freedom Day 2015.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlSupport FSFE, join the FellowshipMake a one time donation]]>http://documentfreedom.org/news/2015/news-20150408-01.en.html
08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0100